iOS 9 To Have Ad Blocking Capabilities 161
An anonymous reader writes: iOS 9 will reportedly carry ad blocking capabilities for it's Safari browser when it is released later this year. The feature wasn't rolled out with the usual fanfare one might expect, and flew under the radar. ZDNet reports: "It's not immediately clear why the new ad-blocking privacy feature was included in iOS 9, due out later this year. After all, the iPhone and iPad maker has its own advertising network -- even if its success was limited (which is putting it nicely). What's clear is that allowing ad-blockers in iOS 9 could deliver a serious blow to Google, the biggest rival to Apple in the mobile space, because advertising remains a massive portion of the search giant's income."
simpler? exclusive ad channel? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:simpler? exclusive ad channel? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:simpler? exclusive ad channel? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple makes, relatively speaking, no money at all from advertising.
Indeed, if you take its entire software ecosystem as a whole, it makes up for a mere fraction of Apple's total profit when compared to its hardware sales.
So when we're all being very clever cynics and conspiracy theorists, perhaps we would do well to look at the motivation of a company in a holistic sense. For Apple, perhaps if they let users control ads, their overall experience of the platform improves, and they're more likely to remain loyal and keep buying hardware.
Re: simpler? exclusive ad channel? (Score:5, Insightful)
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And one of the main reasons they developed Chrome (though the standard compliance thing was a big one too).
You can see why Google had to shaft Apple and push Android though. Imagine the situation they would be in now if Apple dominated all mobile and they were dependent on their 'generosity' to allow advertising and services through.
However I doubt they are doing this so they can switch off the tap to Google. It won't destroy Google or make Apple much extra money, but will absolutely spark of the thermo-nuc
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The thermonuclear option would be for Apple to built an adblocker themselves instead of only providing the means for others to do it, and enable it by default.
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Yeah what would we do without the Google+ app.
Google makes a ton of money on the data they acquire from those apps. iOS users represent heavy consumers. Google needs access to those users and their data more than apple needs Google. That's why Google pays Apple to make sure Google remains the default search option in iOS.
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You can see why Google had to shaft Apple and push Android though. Imagine the situation they would be in now if Apple dominated all mobile and they were dependent on their 'generosity' to allow advertising and services through...
To a large extent Google's mobile advertising business is already dependent on Apple's "generosity". Up to 75% of Google's mobile ad revenue is dependent on Apple's continued placement of Google as the default search engine on its iOS devices http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05... [nytimes.com] - a treasured position which Google pays Apple an estimated $2 billion a year to hold onto http://bgr.com/2015/05/27/ipho... [bgr.com]. The loss of of mobile advertising revenue from iOS platforms would knock over 13% off Googles total revenue (
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Mozilla (back then) only had an interest in having a good user experience, and blocking pop-ups turned out to be an easy way to improve user experience. Likewise, Apple might just be looking to improve user experience. Since they have no financial in
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That analogy is really poor - Google Apps is only free for personal use. Corporates pay for it. And Android is free because they wanted to help unify the mobile OS space, and knew that doing an open source OS was one way to do that.
With this strategy Apple are trying to destroy the revenue stream not only of Google,
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And that's a bad thing? The ad market just needs to die:
1: It is a bubble.
2: Ads on desktop machines have been proven to be a source for malware.
3: Ads propagate data through a lot of unknown sites.
4: It is an ever hungry beast. First text ads, then Flash ads, then whole screen ads, then 60 second commercials before a web page, then 60 second commercials with a paragraph of text... when will it end?
Internet sites existed before the ad market. They can exist and get revenue just fine with text ads or
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I use a PVR or DVR on my TV. I hate ads. They don't work. I wasted a few thousand dollars a couple years ago on radio ads to realize that people have tuned out all ads.
I pay for satelite radio to avoid ads there.
Find another revenue stream. Ads are history. Only the ad execs and the hopeful still want them to work.
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Android is free because they wanted to help unify the mobile OS space
And by "unify", you mean "fragment to the point of being completely dysfunctional". If this is Google's idea of an improvement, they must be some sadistic fucking bastards.
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Ah yes, a female tweaking her box. Can't have that, no siree!
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Are you considering app store revenues as part of the Apple software ecosystem? I would think those profits would be pretty substantial, even when compared against hardware sales.
Re:simpler? exclusive ad channel? (Score:4, Informative)
Apple does $231.5b in revenue. Paid apps revenue is $5.37b. So a couple percent. Advertising BTW is much smaller at $94.5m
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Advertising 1926-2014 hangs around 1 to 1.4% of GDP, with a few exceptional years. Moreover advertising spending lags the media, people trust older media more so even as television replaced radio, radio advertising revenues stayed high well into the early 1960s. Similarly with Internet and old media.
Information technologies spending is around 5-8% or about 5x as large as advertising. Also fairly stable.
Re:simpler? exclusive ad channel? (Score:4, Informative)
I have no idea why, in a technical and privacy oriented forum as ours, the focus of the accepted submission was not on the fact that this is an "Adblocker app enabler" move instead of a "Google killer move".
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1) Will it run on my iPad (and no, I'm not jailbreaking)?
2) Can I use it to block annoying "toolbars" that sites cover 20% of their content with (e.g. Wikia)?
3) Can it be used to defeat modal boxes that try to prevent you from reading articles on various sites?
4) How about the auto-playing video on Bloomberg (and others)?
Answer: NOPE
Besides, uBlock is using 33MB of RAM right now, which is considerably less than GMail. I ca
Re: LMAO @ U "andy ole' boy"... apk (Score:2)
Besides, I'll bet your list includes some sites that I need for work. Oh, your list can't be turned off on a per-site basis without whitelisting that domain everywhere? Maybe that's because it sucks.
At least other ad blockers aren't made by spammers. If you're in the business of making annoying ads why do you make an ad blocker?
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I think it's a step too far to assume that they can insert unintended content arbitrarily into a web page or existing ad slot.
They certainly can. Perhaps you meant will?.
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Yes, that would be more accurate :o]
Re:simpler? exclusive ad channel? (Score:4, Funny)
As for hurting Google, that's a strategy that Google loves to employ themselves, so that's likely a very welcome side effect.
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Hell, it only makes sense in pretty much the entire mobile industry.
Ads, on a transfer-limited device (like phones) are, essentially, theft of resources.
websites forced for two ad networks then (Score:2)
websites forced for two ad networks then, apples and googles.
and wait for the lawsuits to ensue.
though, it might finally lead to ads being delivered from the same host as the rest of the content on the page - that would be some well needed sanity(and removal of javascript from the adverts for the security implications that approach has).
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> though, it might finally lead to ads being delivered from the same host as the rest of the content on the page
This cannot be done. much of graphical and especially streaming content is from more robust "content delivery networks", such as Akamai, that host much larger proxies closer to the web browser's "final mile". Even modest icon or graphical content on a web page will overwhelm many corporate core web servers without these third-party hosted proxies, and it's especially true for ad content. Slashd
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But if they tried to host the advertising content all on the same systems, I'm quite certain it would collapse the servers if not the firewalls themselves.
A plan with no drawbacks!
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Exactly. If websites hosted their own advertisements, they would make sure they didn't hog all the bandwidth. I don't object to all ads, but the vast majority of them are downright terrible. A simple non-moving banner can get the point across and not detract too much from my experience on the page. I think that companies placing the advertisements would actually pay more if there was some kind of standard for advertisement quality. Nobody wants to pay a lot of money to have their product pushed along get
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If websites hosted their own advertisements, they'd have more reason to stop them from carrying malware. Maybe the New York Times wouldn't have infected people's computers.
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I don't see how that would be a drawback. bandwidth is still bandwidth anyhow, so more amazon bills for having ads on your web pages - presumably you would try to get higher ad revenue from the ad broker company to offset that.
slashdot mobile is basically unusable on _1ghz_ android phones now, due to how the ads are served and what they do. it used to be that you could read slashdot on a phone with 3.6mbytes of free ram after boot!(nokia 3650).
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Or you move content sites as well to the CDNs. No reason that can't happen. Then each CDN has a range of ad content they support.
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So what you're saying is that if ads had to be hosted on the same server as the content, ads would have to be approximately the same size as the content or smaller? Perish the thought!
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This cannot be done. much of graphical and especially streaming content is from more robust "content delivery networks", such as Akamai, that host much larger proxies closer to the web browser's "final mile". Even modest icon or graphical content on a web page will overwhelm many corporate core web servers without these third-party hosted proxies
I call bullshit. Distributing content via an edge network is trivial these days, as trivial as flipping a switch in AWS.
Including App Store ads? (Score:5, Interesting)
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One more reason to browse using Firefox which allows ad-blockers (at least on Android), unlike stock Android or iOS browsers.
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I always have my phone. When I'm out, I rarely have my laptop. In general, the best $THING for $ACTION is not the $THING you don't have access to.
iOS is the majority of Google's mobile revenue (Score:4, Informative)
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An external company estimated that they make 75% of their mobile ad revenue from iOS. They don't actually know, it's just a guess.
In the mean time, the Play store did $10bn of app sales. iOS is still doing better, but it's not like Google is starved for cash or not making anything out of Android. And in any case, their primary goal is to make sure there is a good, open mobile OS that isn't a walled garden.
Pro-Apple articles love to make out that Android is failing and Apple is winning hard. 50% of all compu
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They're extensions (Score:1)
While this has been widely represented as Apple providing an add blocker in iOS 9, all that has actually happened is that they've created an API by which thirdparties can add ad-blocking extensions to Safari, and included a placeholder extension for that properties page.
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Yes, and indeed ONLY to Safari. iAds in apps are not affected.
I prefer the rooted Android solution where ads are blocked in the hosts file. They are blocked then for ALL apps, not only the browser (and disabeling the Google add service with Lucky Patcher kills the remaining few).
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I think if you say HOSTS file three times in a mirror, APK shows up.
(Which is a great initialism when you're talking about android.)
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Fortunately XPrivacy is finally becoming usefull on Android 5.x (mainly due to Xposed on ART being worked on). Android 6 is said to have a rights management system built-in (finally!) but it won't be as fine-grained and complete as XPrivacy offers.
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Yes, and indeed ONLY to Safari. iAds in apps are not affected.
I prefer the rooted Android solution where ads are blocked in the hosts file. They are blocked then for ALL apps, not only the browser (and disabeling the Google add service with Lucky Patcher kills the remaining few).
Are you really complaining that you won't be able to block ads in those crappy free apps that sustain themselves by injecting ads into the GUI and sometimes also by stealing your personal data? I've been asked to 'fix' Android phones on a number of occasions and that includes installing the user's favorite apps and games. To it's credit Android conscientiously lists everything the app wants access to when an app is installed. Personal details, contacts list, media/photos and browsing history are standard re
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> Are you really complaining that you won't be able to block ads in those crappy free apps
No because on my Android I AM able to block them. First, there is a hosts file with ad server blocking. Second, most apps that require no internet permission are blocked in my firewall. If it does need internet I can block the Google ads services activity with Lucky Patcher, or have it patch the app itself to remove ads. Xprivacy can block some calls that threaten my privacy and allow ads to be personalized. Very fe
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So what's user's process from seeing an ad on a page to getting that into the hosts file such that you won't see that group of ads again?
Step by step?
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To it's credit Android conscientiously lists everything the app wants access to when an app is installed. Personal details, contacts list, media/photos and browsing history are standard requests with apps that have obvious reasons to access these things.
On the other hand, that means app developers are free to request these things, and if you don't agree that an app reads your contacts list, your only choice is not to use it. On the App Store on the other hand, the app will be rejected if it requests personal data without a good reason.
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Also, if the app does something potentially suspicious on an iPhone, iOS will notify you and ask permission. This means that you can get some use out of apps that ask for permissions you don't want to grant, and when you are asked about permissions you actually have some context.
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I prefer the rooted Android solution where ads are blocked in the hosts file.
HOSTS! FTW!
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APK, I know people give you a lot of shit regarding hosts, but please don't ever stop.
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I tried blocking javascript, but I don't feel like spending 5 minutes on every site figuring out which scripts to let through. Besides, uBlock and ghostery stop the worst ones.
As for your "doing less with more" claim: my question is, which blocks more ads? Answer: uBlock/Adblock, your system blocks fewer ads and I'm more than happy to spend an extra 1% of my computer's powe
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We hereby petition the government of the United States of America to review our proposal for putting Alexander Peter Kowalski (i.e. APK) to death by any means available. This individual is a menace to society and has proven himself to be a drain on the productivity for the millions of IT workers worldwide that spend so much time uncontrollably laughing at APK and his
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It was really fun imagining him typing furiously hoping that somehow his inane rants would anger me. Obviously I managed to piss him off pretty bad. A more thorough effort might actually get him angry enough that his ancient body finally gives out, thus finally freeing us of this bigoted, attention-seeking, spammer.
OTOH, he might feed off this kind of attention, spamming
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I am not an advertiser, I'm an engineer. I don't work for advertisers, and my job has nothing to do with ads. I hate ads, including yours.
I'm not sure why you're so fixated on my sexual orientation, other than perhaps psychosis or repression. Either way, I'll enjoy dancing on your grave. I'll even put on a pride flag on it for you.
Antitrust (Score:1, Troll)
There have been antitrust allegations [npr.org] around Apple's new streaming music service. This seems to me to be just another way to prevent the competition from actually competing.
People used to scream holy hell when MS did this kind of shit, but Apple is just as bad and in many cases much worse. I guess they saw that Microsoft got off with a little wrist slap so why not use borderline illegal (or blatantly illegal, once in a while) anticompetitive tactics.
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There have been antitrust allegations around Apple's new streaming music service. This seems to me to be just another way to prevent the competition from actually competing.
People used to scream holy hell when MS did this kind of shit, but Apple is just as bad and in many cases much worse. I guess they saw that Microsoft got off with a little wrist slap so why not use borderline illegal (or blatantly illegal, once in a while) anticompetitive tactics.
Here is a paragraph from the article that you quote, to put this into perspective: But Castle says he will be surprised if this goes anywhere. Apple, he notes, has a lot of competition in the streaming music space: Spotify, YouTube, GooglePlay, Amazon. "There are inquiries all the time" he says. "They ask a few questions. You send a response and that's it."
In other words: There's lots of smoke without a fire.
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People used to scream bloody hell when Microsoft did it, because Microsoft had monopolies. To run a normal business, people had to have Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Try anything different, and they'd likely have subtle (or not so-subtle) incompatibilities that they'd have to deal with.
Apple never had a monopoly in desktop or laptop computers. Back in the dinky market before the IBM PC, they were probably the best-selling brand, but they had a lot of competition. For a while, Apple had an a
Google is an advertising company (Score:2)
so obviously they won't be able to match Apple's move and provide built-in ad blocking for Chrome or Android.
An interesting FU from Apple to Google.
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Google don't need to provide any more than Apple have done. The *capability* to do so.
In fact, they already do that, it's just not made a huge fuss about because - why would you unless you DIDN'T have it? Google don't make their own ad-blocker the same as Apple don't make their own ad-blocker, but now they are just providing the function to allow such things.
This just allows ad-blocking plugins on iOS, basically. Chrome's had plugins on iOS for ages: Safari's had plugins too. But neither were able to h
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Browser Extension Required (Score:4, Interesting)
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After reading the linked ZDNet article, looks like Apple is only allowing extensions in Safari to block content with in the browser. Thus allowing things like Ghostery and NoScript to be possible or more affective in iOS 9. Bottom line, if you want ad-blocking in iOS 9 you will have to wait for the proper ad-blocking extension to be available, or write one yourself.
So i wonder if that means this will be a framework that's available to developers for their own browsers?
I love the planitif bleating of the billionaires (Score:2)
The crap SEO whores and whatnot of the type that have 50%+ advertising and sell my data wouldn't get a cent.
I will turn this feature on in a second and never look back.
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There are all sorts of sites out there that sell individual articles like Forrestor? How many have you bought this year?
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In theory I just described paypal but the problem there is that they aren't really conducive to micropayments. They love their macro fees thought.
So the wall between me and anything like forrestor would be that ev
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If an article that saves you a day's work up front isn't worth $200-2000 much less $2 then you are just too a customer that is too hard to sell to. They make more money from advertising to you then selling you content. The market you are asking for can't exist, it just isn't profitable enough.
The app market mainly exists because:
a) There are small numbers of people paying a lot (either in the commercial space or addicts for in app purchases)
b) There are large numbers of people willing to pay some. But
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Thus I would much prefer sifting through stackoverflow at a small but steady burn instead of the probable rip off at a higher price. So while any given article might save me a pile of money most would be a waste of money.
Netflix is also a betterish model to compare to. Their cost to pro
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That's a subscription model not a lowish per article model. With a few exceptions like Wall Street Journal (and even theirs is starting to fail) most sites don't have content uniquely good enough to keep subscribers. As you get more specialized it works. Certainly that model works but the cost per user is high not low.
As It Should Be (Score:1)
Ad blocking is a right. If I buy a device, I should be allowed to control the I/O -- including disallowing any ads. Advertising, sadly, has become the de facto "business model" for the WWW. I work in IT and have for three decades. Almost no one clicks on ads. They make money because of impressions. The page paints and they get credit for the ad having been seen. Some ads follow clicks to pay, some don't. I don't see any of them and never will again. I block everything.
Finally, Apple.
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Ad blocking is a right. If I buy a device, I should be allowed to control the I/O -- including disallowing any ads
I wish this opinion was more widely adopted, and expanded to my television set.
Not clear? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not immediately clear why the new ad-blocking privacy feature was included in iOS 9
Well there's a pretty obvious reason why, and I don't see any reason to discount it. It's a feature that users will like, and Apple is in the business of trying to make devices that people like. Even more specifically, Apple's general approach to making "devices that people like" tends to be to try to take the hassle out of using the product, as much as is possible. Ads are a big hassle.
It seems like a pretty obvious answer, so much so that I don't see a reason to go hunting for another one without some kind of additional information that there's some other reason.
More Paywalls (Score:4, Interesting)
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The downside to paywalls is that it restricts access.
The upside to paywalls is that it means that comments sections aren't full of bullshit and trolling.
I might be willing to pay for paywalls on second thought.
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I've seen sites where reading is free but you have to pay to comment.
The downside was that so few people paid that there wasn't a vibrant discussion.
I don't understand ad blockers (Score:2)
I understand why people want to block pop-up and pop-under ads. I have those blocked too (and I don't think you even need to block those since not many people use them anymore.) But I don't understand why people want to block regular banner ads. Coming up with content then hosting it on a website isn't free. If advertisers want to pay for it because they think displaying an easy to ignore banner at the bottom of the page makes me more likely to buy their crap then all the better. It is better than having to
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I don't understand why people want to block regular banner ads... I think John Oliver gave a really good summary of the problem with sponsored content AKA native advertising:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
He answered your question in the video. Content is something people want to have, but don't want to pay for.
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But I don't understand why people want to block regular banner ads. Coming up with content then hosting it on a website isn't free.
Because of drive-by downloads.
Last year the ad network of a non-trivial Norwegian site was hacked, and they started serving malware which targeted Java. If the user hadn't updated Java fairly recently, they'd get infected without any user interaction.
The malware was designed specifically to target the largest bank in Norway. This bank required Java for their login procedure (they no longer do, took them long enough).
So, if the user visited this site with a vulnerable Java runtime, and then logged in to this
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If banner ads were still static, or even animated, gif images, I wouldn't block them. But many "regular banner ads" these days come with some pretty obnoxious javascript, stupid HTML5 tricks, and sometimes even flash (still). That sort of resource-hogging, battery-draining, vulnerability-inducing, malware-spreading nastiness needs to die, whether it's in a pop up/under, an interstitial, or "just" a banner.
So yah, I block them and don't blame anyone else for doing so. I do whitelist some sites I want to s
Meh... (Score:2)
I already do adblocking on all my android devices. Until they start paying for my cellphone bandwidth, ad's dont appear on my devices.
Why block Active Directory (Score:1)
Fullscreen Adverts and Redirects (Score:2)
There is a real problem with mobile browsing right now. Many websites employ fullscreen adverts with an [x] button which is tricky to hit properly with the fingers. There is also the problem of redirects, whereby the browser is hijacked and redirected via an advertising system to a URL which opens an AppStore link (usually one of these freemium games). It's all really annoying and not at all a pleasant experience.
Now, if someone can make a blocker which gets rid of those pesky EU cookie warnings which appea
Yes, but can it block ads in apps? (Score:1)
I'd like it to be consistent throughout.
Nice try with your hyperbole. (Score:1)
"What's clear is that allowing ad-blockers in iOS 9 could deliver a serious blow to Google, the biggest rival to Apple in the mobile space, because advertising remains a massive portion of the search giant's income."
These people keep saying this, and yet Apple is still considered an also-also-ALSO ran in two of the world's potentially largest markets: China and India. In these markets, Android and other OSes (and the mobile manufacturers behind them) rule the roost and Apple barely makes a dent (and isn't t
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iOS is a large enough ecosystem to survive indefinitely, with stores and app developers and everything. There's room for more than one in the mobile area. MS Windows might be big enough, although the release of MS Office for iOS and Android suggests that Microsoft doesn't think so.
The problem with China and India is that people aren't going to make much money there, not for some time. This may hurt Apple in a couple of decades, but not in the short or medium run.
Weblock and other iOS adblocker apps (Score:2)
Yeah, I'm a bit late to comment, but haven't found any mention in the threads. There are existing adblockers for iOS that work fine, and they work not just for browsing, but for other apps as well, pretty useful!